Grumble! I spent over half an hour tonight shredding credit card applications, auto insurance offers, cash advances, and home equity loan offers. Then there are the investment oriented junk mails. I can’t just throw them away as someone might come along, raid our garbage, and steal them, fill them out, and borrow money in our names. Identify theft and fraud is rapant these days! Some of them include checks for large sums of money that if you cash them, indebts you for life, or signs you up for some service that you don;t need, but costs a lot more than the check you got. And these credit card companies send the junk mails every month, maybe more! So by the end of every month there is pile of the stuff to shred! Our shredder will only shred 5 pages, so I can’t just shove the whole thing in there. I have to open each and every one, and put the main copy with the name and address on in the shredder. The other stuff goes into the recycle bin. When the shredder is full, I dump the cross shredded paper into my compost bin. So much wasted time!

For about the last week, I am seeing my logs that my site is being slammed by online casinos. At least I am assuming they are casinos, or at least gambling related. They all seem to have gambling related words such as poker, or texas holdem, or roulette, and words like that in theri URLs. In the logs, it looks like I am getting traffic from these sites, but I serious doubt. The hits will come for hours, then stop. I will think it is over, but then the next day it starts again. They don’t seem to be attempting to leave comment spam. It seems like their goal is to try to get blog authors to click through the links out of curiousity as to where their traffic is coming from? I have no idea. But they are are playing having with my blog stats making it look like most of my traffic is coming from these sites. I looked at the logs, and they all show unique IP address. Whatever! I hate spammers!

My wife and I went to the Red Robin in Webster, NY tonight to celebrate her birthday. They weren’t too busy, and we got a table without a wait. We did have to wait a little before the waitress came to help us, but not too long. My wife ordered, and then I ordered my usual Bonzai Burger. What I have had on every visit for over 20 years. The waitress informed me that they were out of pineapple. Excuse me? Why are they out of pineapple? Pineapple is a main ingredient of two of their signature sandwiches: the Bonzai Burger and the Teriyaki Chicken Burger. Why are they out of pineapple. I told the waitress to go away while I figured out what I wanted instead. I was debating between the Royal Red Robin Burger and a Red Robin Bacon Cheeseburger. I was not really happy at that point. The waitress came back and asked if I would like to talk to the manager. The manager came and told me that they were able to make a Bonzai Burger using pineapple from the bar. I appreciated them improvising and making a Bonzai Burger the way they did. But as a stockholder in the company, I don’t like the fact that someone in management didn’t order enough pineapple to begin with. Then why didn’t they send someone down to the local grocery store (directly across the street) to buy some pineapple. The customers shouldn’t have even been aware that there was problem.

Beware! Identity thieves are using a new scam! They call up pretending to be a court worker claiming that you failed to report for jury duty. They might threaten to issue a warrant for your arrest. They will ask you for various information such as social security number, and possibly credit card numbers.

Never give out your Social Security number, credit card numbers or other personal confidential information when you receive a telephone call.

A buddy of mine today was whining about Google saying repeatedly that Google sucks. His main complaint was that his pages weren’t in the top listings for relevant keywords, when they used to be. For years I have been telling him to get his own domain, but he hasn’t listened. He sticks with his site being on his local ISP. So he doesn’t get any stats. If he got stats he might be sureprised as to how much traffic he gets from Google, and what keywords people are using to find his page. Having his own might also boost his position in the SERPS (search engine results pages). But he doesn’t listen. He also complained that Google wasn’t giving him relevant search results anymore, and that Yahoo gave better results. He also complained that the Similar Pages didn’t return anything similar. Frankly I ahve never used the Similar Pages function, so I couldn’t care less.
For the first six months in the life of zero2rich.com, Google wouldn’t give my site the time of day. But then after six months I got in, then a month later I got in some more pages. Now Google is my top referer. And having access to stats, I can see the phrases and keywords that I am getting hits for. Are they the ones I thought I would be getting hits for? Not usually. But with access to the pages that get the most hits, and the keywords people are using, I can tweak my pages to add a few Amazon items here or there, or make similar pages, etc. Google does drive me a little nuts sometimes, but does it suck? No. Besides I am making a significant amount of money from Google Adsense, and making a little more all the time
So to my buddy…wahhhh wahhhhh!